Sunday, October 27, 2013

Want to know where the new wave of horror is coming from?
Well I’d say it’s Latin America! Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay… just a few of
the spawning grounds for original genre fare right now – and has been for the
past four—five years, amusingly just after the success of the Spanish wave.
Still not sure that this is right? Well just look at your recent genre fare!
Directors like Adrián Garcia Bogliano, Jorge Michel Grau, Fede Alvarez and
others, are popping up in anthology flicks, getting big exposure for their
domestic flicks, and in some cases even getting shots at and remaking their own
films all over again but now with Yankee dollars in the USA! (where did Gustavo
Hernandez go, and when does the third generation of Cardona’s break through? And
No I haven’t forgotten the master of them all; Guillermo Del Toro, he just plays
in a completely different league!)

Patricio ValladeresEn las afueras de la ciudad (Hidden in the Woods) is no
exception. This piece of savage but contemporary Mexpoitation trash did the festival circuit and
then got picked up for a US remake featuring Micheal Biehn, Willam Forsyth and
Robert Rodriguez regular Electra Avellan in lead roles.

Kicking off with a classic “Based on a true story” card, drug
dealing drunk, Felipe [Daniel Antivil] is will stop at nothing to learn the
name of his wife’s secret lover, and murders her in front of their two infant
daughters. He buries her body in the woods and tells them that mommy has gone
to heaven. The years pass and Felipe raises his two daughters, Ana [Siboney Lo]
and Anny [Carolina Escobar] in his own disdainful way, complete with nightly
visits and day after stories laying the blame on “the bogey man” for abusing
the girls. Further down the road, Anny gives birth to his own grandson, an
inbred mutated beast with sharp teeth and an appetite for raw meat.

Felipe makes his living by hiding drugs for regional Kingpin Costello
[François Soto] who makes random visits to the cabin in the woods and looks the
two young women over with an unhealthy stare and disturbing remarks about
Felipe sending them over to him when they are old enough… Ironically despite
all his terrible flaws as an abusive pedophilic, incestuous parent, Filipe will
let no one else harm his little girls.

The so far delightfully trashy and on spot exploitative plot
takes a sharp turn when Felipe is sent to jail after attacking two police
officers with a chainsaw! The girls grab their mutant child/nephew/teenager
Manuel [José Hernandez] and make a dash for it. Out of the frying pan… into
Hell!

Being all-alone with no money or a place to stay, makes it only
a matter of time before Ana takes to giving random dudes blowjobs for cash, and
for some reason blowjobs lead to cannibalism. Well at least it get’s the girls,
and inbred kid off the prostitution racket! Felipe find himself in his own hell
too, as he’s thrown in jail with a bunch of bad-asses who all work for
Costello, who just for the sake of it want’s Felipe dead before he tells of his
drug dealing affairs with Costello. Ironically Felipe is the only one who knows
where Costello’s drugs are hidden and uses this fact as leverage against
Costello in an attempt to force the drug lord into getting him out of jail…

In a counter move, Costello sends his goons out to find the
girls, Felipe breaks out of jail to save his daughters, and after being beaten
and raped the girls decide to confront Uncle Costello once and for all in what
promises to be a bloody mess of family resolutions and rushes of harsh insight!

Hidden in the Woods is a fun, shit-kicking movie that is more or less a
concentrate of everything that the Latin American horror films stands for! It
brings it all to the park, dark violence, inbred freaks, incest, abuse, rape,
cannibalism, death, revenge, oh and I almost forgot the birthing scene! One
could sum it up as: find a taboo and push past it. Find a body and abuse it
physically, sexually, demonically or any way you can. Find a character and make
it suffer and bleed. Find the rules and break them! Hidden in the Woods is a feisty
little mongrel and I loved every demented minute of it! If you want a provocative
piece of trash that nurses a genre “taboo fetish” majestically and has a blood
lust like none other, then Hidden in the Woods is the ticket for you!

Monday, October 14, 2013

Franco Prosperi, no not the Mondo maverick, but the other
Franco Prosperi, writer of such classic films as Jess Franco’sMondo Canibale
(White Cannibal Queen) 1980, Mario Bava’sLa ragazza che sapeva troppo (The
Evil Eye) 1963 and Ercole al centro della Terra (Hercules in the Haunted World)
1961 - which he co-directed with Bava, and director of low budget and
exploitation films such as Un uomo dalla pelle dura (The Boxer) 1972 and this
one, Last House on the Beach, serves up a decent home invasion rape revenge
yarn with a solid set of actors like Ray Lovelock, Florinda Bolkan, Sherry
Buchanan and Laura Trotter in the cast!

Basically, and vaguely, The Last House on the Beach is yet
another take on Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan(The Virgin Spring) 1960, written by Ulla Isaksson. The same movie that
inspired sardonic grit-fests like Wes Craven’sLast House on the Left, Aldo
Lado’sL’ultimo treno della note (Night Train Murders)1975 and Ruggero
Deodato’sLa casa sperduta nel parco (House on the Edge of the Park) 1980, and
also this variant Franco Prosperi’s La settima Donna (Last House on the Beach).

Three bank robbers, under the lead of Aldo [Ray Lovelock],
take to hiding in a summerhouse inhabited by Sister Christina [Florinda Bolkan]
and half dozen young women. The men take the young woman hostage – after
beating the maid to death with a hot iron.Tension builds as the thugs start to rape and abuse the women one by
one, eventually forcing Sister Christina to go against her faith, refuse to
turn the other cheek and start to take revenge!

Romano Migliorini and Gianbattista Mussetto wrote a
screenplay from the story by Ettore Sanzò. Ettore Sanzò had previously written
screenplays to Aldo Lado’sNight Train Murders and Massimo Dallamano’s
magnificent La polizia chiede auto (What have they done to Your Daughters)
1974, so Sanzó had been up the “young women in peril” street before. Despite
being gritty, misogynistic and grim, the movie is still somewhat cheesy,
possibly more due to the shoddy dubbing more than the actual performances or
narrative.But not all is lost, some
effective passages of dialogue work in a timeframe that helps set a time limit
and a tension builder in the shape of the returning buss that will arrive and
pick up Sister Christina and the young women. In some ways it works as a
reliever as we know help – or possible salvation – will be on the way, but when
the Nuns at the convent call, without getting through, to tell them that the
buss will be a da late, it works as a tension builder instead. Sister Christina
is relying on keeping everyone safe until the buss arrives on the third day,
but as this isn’t going to happen, tension builds to a boiling point… well kind
of.

Characters are polarized; the male bank robbers are
sinister, randy and somewhat dumb, whilst the girls are gentle, savvy and innocent–
despite an early scene where they slip out of their tops whilst sunbathing, but
quickly put them back on when Sister Christina approaches the pool area. This is
simply Good versus Evil, with the exception of Lovelock who, in this mix, comes
off as a dimensional character. (Which he isn’t really.)

Lovelock acts as something of a red herring, as he at times
steps in to stop abuse, or help a girl out, but on the other hand provokes the
two other kidnappers to go over the edge, holds a knife to Sister Christina and
forces her to watch the other two thugs rape one of the young women. He also
has a strange flirt with Margret [Luisa Maneri] who he bonds with and shows some
form of affection for… but we all know that just below the surface it’s old
school manipulation!

As all rape-revenge flicks, the main narrative is to push
the god-fearing protagonist as far as possible until this character snaps and
becomes a like worthy or equal force of antagonism towards the antagonists. In Last house on the Beach, a very symbolic act is used to show Sister Catherine's transition as she steps up and takes on the villains who have molested, terrorized, raped and
murdered members of her young flock!

Early on you can hear a super weird Roxy Music sound-alike
track “Place for the Landing” courtesy of Roberto Pregadio with Ray Lovelock
blurting out vocals in his best Bryan Ferry imitation. But there’s a really
neat title track with the great Edda Dell’Orso that adds the versatile mix of
this movie. If nothing else, I take the great soundtrack with me from this
film.

A lurid piece of trash that possibly becomes grittier as the
groovy Roberto Pregadio soundtrack is blasted loud over almost every scene of
violence and misogynist moments are depicted in surreal fashion mixing extreme
close ups, victim point of view, and slow-motion whilst eerie dronish beats
play over the sadistic acts. Last House on the Beach is rape revenge, home
invasion cheapie done the book, worth the time, but not one that left an
imprint in time.

Oh, and if anyone knows if there’s two or one Franco
Prosperi, and if so, who made what, then please let me know. Personally I can’t
decide if there actually where/are two or really just one. They both worked at
the same time, in the same industry, in the same country in the same genre and
at times on the same film it seems… Reading filmographies, their paths cross a
few steps to close of each other on several occasions to be just coincidental.
Right now, I’m leaning towards there being only one, as THIS Franco Prosperi
supposedly edited Jacopetti & the other Prosperi’sAddio zio Tom (Goodbye
Uncle Tom) 1971… it’s confusing, so anyone who actually KNOWS, you are more
than welcome to let me know.

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Continuing his study of vengeance, human deterioration, moral grounds and
violent death, Nicolas Winding Refn takes to the heat and fluorescent base
colors to tell the story of a family constellation set against a bad ass cop
and his henchmen.

Julian [Ryan Gosling] and his brother Billy [Tom Burke] run
a drugs racket out of Bangkok, Thailand. Billy goes over the edge raping and
beating a 16-year-old girl to death. When the police arrive on the scene, Inspector Chang [Vithaya Pansringarm] choses to brings in the father of the girl in instead, and tells him to take his revenge upon Billy. Upon his death, their mother
Crystal [Kristin Scott Thomas] arrives and questions why Julian hasn’t taken
the vengeance she claims Billy would have done if the issue where the opposite.
Always in the shadow of his older brother – even in death – Julian tries to
settle the scores in his own way, and possibly uses the situation to solve some
unsettled family issues.

Not as violent as Drive, not as trippy as Valhalla Rising,
not as out of the box as Bronson, but definitely a combination of all three. In
a way one could chose to read Only God Forgives as a dysfunctional family tale
and how the pressure to fit in and be accepted drives one to the darkest places
of mankind. What Refn does though is to question morale and character
positioning. We know that Julian and his family are villains – even though
there is a chance that Julian is trying his hardest to stand outside of the
smuggling racket and focuses his time on the Thai Boxing club he spends time at
– and this creates a protagonist with dimension. At the same time Inspector
Chang uses a profound over use of violence and alternative policing tactics in
his fight against the drug smugglers – it doesn’t need to be spoken out loud,
one can understand the frustration that has driven him to this point. We also
understand that there can be no real winner (or can there?) to this tale of
dystopia, hot nights and loneliness, but at the same time we end up rooting for
characters that are questionable when it comes to their moral positioning.

Just as he does in Drive, Valhalla Rising, Bronson – and earlier films like Bleeder and the Pusher Trilogy – Refn presents us with
complex characters who are on the wrong side of the law, classic anti heroes,
and fascinating personalities that linger on in your head long after the film
has finished. I find that Refn makes two kinds of films, the dark dramas that
more or less play along the rules of classic narrative such as the Pusher
films, Bleeder, Fear X and Drive and then the alternative experimental ones
like Valhalla Rising and Only God Forgives. It’s almost one classic, one
experimental.

Only God Forgives is a seductive, mesmerizing and
provocative dark drama that mocks convention and dares question classic
characters and narrative.

Nicolas Winding Refn is a genius and I will not stop
crossing my fingers until he get’s his adaptation of the Jodorowsky/Moebius
(Jean Giraud) epic The Incal written, shot, edited and on a screen near me.
Long Live Nicolas Winding Refn!

Friday, October 04, 2013

Home invasion films are a sub niche that has grown strong
and powerful these last couple of years! Personally it’s among my favorite as I
once was a victim of home invasion. A woman I’d never met before was in my
apartment in the middle of the night and even though I managed to get her out,
call the cops and change all the locks to my doors, the scars left where deep,
hence this being the genre that creeps me out the most, which in my book, makes You're Next one of the most tantalizing creep-flicks this year!

A family gathers in a remote house to celebrate the 35-year
anniversary of their parents. Outside a band of homicidal predators put the
house under siege and start to minimize the number of family members one by
one.What they don’t know is that one
person on the inside knows more about survival than they had reckoned on.

It’s clear that Adam Wingard knows how to get an audience to
invest in his characters and story, and he does it almost by the book. This is
a good thing and a trait that serves Wingard well. It’s definitely one of the
reasons this mumble core - horror filmmaker is considered part of the horror
genres future. Well, OK, Wingard is a fucking great director, but kudos needs
to be given to Simon Barret too, because Barret is a pretty important part of the Wingard
success, as Barret writes the scripts to Wingard’s movies. A Horrible Way to
Die, Autoerotic, You’re Next, V/H/S, V/H/S/2, all Barret.

You’re Next starts up with a raw initial attack to set the
tone; a couple in their post coital state of sweatiness become victims of an
off-screen assailant. When we finally get to see the killers, they hide their
faces behind childish animal masks. This presents the threat in the outside world,
a threat in the dangerous place outside the safety of indoors. The masks make
the threat more inhuman, and it also plays on genre convention – , the masked
monster, the confusion of an unidentifiable assailant, the defaced killer who
we are supposed to guess the identity of. Most likely the use of animal faces
made for children is a way to take a harmless object and fill it with danger,
doom and death is an ironic decision. Something cute becomes an object of
terror.

The title of the film is presented in an Apocalypse Now kind
of fashion – scrawled across an object instead of classic graphic vignette,
although this time it’s blood on a window. It all adds to building the threat
and allows perfect polarization against the presentation of our lead characters
Crispian[AJ Bowen] and Erin [Sharni
Vinson]. Crispian and Erin are on their way to Crispian’s parents, and we
quickly understand that this is the first time Erin is to meet them. We also
learn that Crispians parents are filthy rich, that family gatherings are few
and that there are “certain issues” within the family. Erin is secretive about
her background, which will be put into focus later on in the narrative. Cut to
mother and father who enter their new home, the same home where the family
gathering is to take place at. Paul [Rob Moran] and wife Aubrey [Barbara
Compton] step up to the front door of the house only to find the door unlocked!
In the following ten minutes the house becomes something of a McGuffin as it
groans and creeks, suggestive camera angles show POV shots out of door
openings, and windows. The tension builds, eventually sending Aubrey screaming
out the front door convinced that there’s someone in the house… Paul does an obligatory
and half-hearted check of the house whilst Aubrey cowers outside, giving
Wingard a perfect moment to build anticipation and toss the real first
jump-scare at us. It’s an effective one and it’s needed as the next couple of
minutes are going to be spent branching out the family and cast.

This is time spent building up the hierarchy and dynamics of
the family unit consisting of elder brother Drake [Joe Swanberg], complete with
bully mannerisms and narcissist wife Kelly [Sarah Myers], hipster chic little
sister Aimee [Amy Seimetz], her boyfriend Tariq [Ti West – yes, director of The Innkeepers and The House of the Devil]
and baby brother Felix [Nicholas Tucci] and his girlfriend Zee [Wendy Glenn].
Character traits are rapidly exposed and in a way this is almost similar to the
obligatory archetype presentations found in generic slasher - and college films,
we understand the dynamics and how Drake bullies and manipulates them all,
holding an reign of terror upon his siblings, all with the support of mom and
dad, who are smugly pleased and teary eyed over the fact the they finally
managed to get their children all together – despite all their internal issues
and conflicts.

In all honesty, the family are perhaps not characters that get any sympathies
from the audience – after all this is a horror shocker and we just want the
carnage to start - but there’s some form of emotional recognition with Crispian
and his constant underdog positioning. We are also pushed towards feeling for Erin,
who in contrast to all the others offers to help out I the kitchen and is the
one to take command when the terror starts to intrude the privacy of their safe
world. So with the basic structure, let us call it “The Ordinary World”
established the tableau is set and it’s time to bring on the horror.

After a bout of “brotherly love” and “guilt tripping” (all
great devices to use in horror) the ordinary world is shattered as the chaotic
dinner party turns to violent massacre when crossbow arrows start being shot
through the windows at the family, who now are reduced to a bunch of sitting
ducks. There’s a shot of an arrow smashing into the framed photograph of the
family sending shards of glass allover the place, a great metaphor for the
destruction of the family unit, which this film is a representation of in more
than one way. The realization that there’s an antagonist on the outside of the
house sees the inhabitants start their fight for survival, and this could have
been good enough to get the game underway, and wind tension up. But we know
that there’s someone inside the house too, which increases the threat and makes
the narrative even more suspenseful… when will they pounce and how hard will
they hit!?

Oh, if they’d only listened to mother!

The masked assailants hit hard and ferocious and at times the violence is really sadistic and grim. At the same time there's a dark comedic undertone that flows through the film, something that one could consider a trait of Wingard and the mumblecore horror scene. Not slapstick or schtick, but more small things in life that are funny in their everyday way... or absurdity such as a blender to the brain!

After the dining room attack the movie really shifts gears
and goes “all in” on the Survival Horror themes. Classic protagonist vs.
antagonist traits presenting characters to root for and others to question, and
manipulating the audience into each now shock/gore/death scene. Our voyeuristic
sadism gets what it’s craving and at the same time we find a strong protagonist
in one of the characters. Perhaps it’s not all that original, considering the
conventional genre roles in horror, although this one has a logic and backstory
to it that I found satisfying. Nobody becomes a superhero in the flash of an
eye, it’s all planted along the narrative, as is reveals of what really is
happening to the family. Tidbits of dialogue dropped along the way and
seemingly unimportant acts all tie into the movie further down the road, and
this is where I find the skill of the Barret/Wingard cooperation as details all
come together as rushes of insight hit the audience.

An interesting scene is found somewhere in the second half,
where a specifically violent and sadistic axe to the head beating, sees the
masked killer almost being nauseated by his own acts. He gags, grunts and has
to sit down on the sofa after the deed. This was fascinating, as I never
earlier have seen a scene of violence where the dark hearted antagonist almost
instantly is quenched by his/her own guilt. That’s what I kind of liked with
the way the movie climaxes to as it forces characters to question their morale
and judgment, just as it makes the audience ask the same questions. How far can
you go in doing wrong for a good cause?

You’re Next is a spectacular example of contemporary horror.
It takes the familiarity of the home invasion sub genre and brings a number of
interesting new ingredients to it, and for once I’m actually glad to knowing
what drives the killers, why this is happening, and watch a movie that does
deliver some kind of closure at the end. All truths are revealed, and the truth hurts! With that said, You’re Next is in no
way a movie that holds back on the nihilism, rather the opposite, it is dark,
unpredictable, ominous and will make you think twice about attending family
reunions for the rest of your life!

A slice of horror cinema served up in the best possible way, You’re Next hits Swedish cinemas 15th of November! Go see it, because we don't really get this kind of genre fare on screens here all that often!